IC21: The Intelligence Community in the
21st Century

V. SIGINT: Signals Intelligence

Executive Summary

The SIGINT staff study relied heavily on the foundation of the Committee's oversight and
evaluation of both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the United States SIGINT System
(USSS) for the past several years, to include recent hearings dedicated to SIGINT program
management and the Global Network Initiative. This was augmented with two panels, one
composed of the Division Chiefs within NSA's Directorate of Operations (DO), and one of the
Chiefs of the Service Cryptologic Elements (SCEs); a variety of focused interviews; and a series of
questions for the record.

The study states at the outset that NSA is an extremely successful organization and that the
recommendations contained in the study are intended to improve an agency and a functional system
that have provided invaluable support to the nation's policy makers. Although the study group does
not believe that the cradle-to-grave approach to a discipline is necessarily the most constructive
approach for the future, it has served the nation well in the past and certain elements of the NSA
model are worthy of emulation by the rest of the technical intelligence community.

The success of the SIGINT system has been in large part due to NSA's formally established
technical control over the discipline, which has resulted in the development of a coherent
architecture for collection, processing, exploitation, analysis and reporting. However, this very
strength has become also a weakness, as the resources required to maintain the Consolidated
Cryptologic Program (CCP) infrastructure' are now competing with investment in the core missions
of NSA. Because of the way the Intelligence Community is structured and "managed," SIGINT
requirements compete only with other SIGINT requirements within an artificial top line dictated in
large part by last year's appropriated amount. Increasing personnel costs, for example, thus result
in reduced research and development expenditures, one of the few "discretionary" funding categories
within the CCP.

In the broadest sense, SIGINT is a "bridge" between imagery's ability to observe activity and
HUMINT's ability to gauge intentions. With its current global reach and multiple sources of
collection, SIGINT provides a hedge against strategic deception and can be extremely useful for the
tipping of other collection assets. As the Information Age continues to evolve, the task of
maintaining the SIGINT system's global reach is becoming more difficult; however, the trend
towards increasingly interconnected telecommunications networks using various transmission media,
in conjunction with the more fluid geopolitical environment of the post-Cold War world, makes
global access more critical than ever before. Access, however, is only one piece of the puzzle. The
most important challenges of the future may lie in the quantity and quality of what is being
transmitted rather than the means of

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transmission. The ability to filter through the huge volumes of data and to extract the information
from the layers of formatting, multiplexing, compression, and transmission protocols applied to each
message is the biggest challenge of the future. Increasing amounts and sophistication of encryption
add another layer of complexity.

Signals Intelligence today is at a crossroads. The global revolution in communications
technology demands new techniques, new procedures, and a new corporate mindset. The technical
challenges currently facing the SIGINT community are daunting, but the outlook of those involved
is cautiously optimistic. As with past and future SIGINT targets, the very technology that creates
the difficulties can be the most effective tool to overcome them. This assumes, however, a sufficient
level of investment to enable SIGINT to stay close behind technology. A commitment to preserve
the technical capability to access and exploit all major communications media worldwide requires
a level of investment that is not now planned for the SIGINT system over the Future Years Defense
Program (FYDP). And yet, SIGINT is already the most expensive of the intelligence disciplines.
How to balance the required level of investment in technology with the maintenance of existing core
capabilities is perhaps the true challenge for SIGINT as it moves toward the 21st century.

In keeping with our recommendations in the Intelligence CommunityManagement staff
study, we believe that the rest of the technical collection community would benefit from the
application of a variant of the DIRNSA's (Director of NSA) technical control over SIGINT. We
also believe that the Intelligence Community (IC) and the nation would benefit from programming
and budgeting decisions that were based on a cross-discipline analysis of collection, production and
infrastructure requirements and capabilities, rather than artificial trade-offs within programs or
specific disciplines. Our proposals for improved community management of R&D investment and,
in particular, consolidation and reform of personnel management should also prove of significant
benefit to the SIGINT community. This study highlights the need for improved management and
focus of SIGINT R&D to ensure that critical areas are adequately funded and the need to reshape
the workforce for the 21st century.

In a more centralized structure, the SIGINT "stovepipe" would still exist, although ideally
with much greater permeability at all levels, to capitalize on the professionalism and expertise of the
cryptologic workforce. However, we believe that much of the analysis that is conducted at NSA
today is more properly done under the auspices of an all-source collection agency such as Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), although this resubordination
could be done electronically rather than physically. We also believe that there are specific areas of
the SIGINT system that require improvement or more management attention; these are detailed in
the classified study.